Hello and thank you for visiting AikiWeb, the
world's most active online Aikido community! This site is home to
over 22,000 aikido practitioners from around the world and covers a
wide range of aikido topics including techniques, philosophy, history,
humor, beginner issues, the marketplace, and more.

If you wish to join in the discussions or use the other advanced
features available, you will need to register first. Registration is
absolutely free and takes only a few minutes to complete so sign up today!

Do you want to know the answer? First, ask your fellow aikidokas, their teachers, or even the most respected akido shihans today, the fallowed question. The question is: "Are they able, for sure, to avoid every first attack of any boxer, or just anyone?" O-Sensei was able to do it, and that is the essence of His art. Think about it and don't look for the answer on this forum even if you were joking.

I do not see what the big deal is with reopening the thread again. Let the people who want to discuss this, do it. If you have made comments on this thread and already have your answer then go on to something else.

People on this forum are always harping on keeping an open mind but then tell a new guy who has a question that we all aiki web masters already have the answer so do not bother.

As if enough hasn't been done to keep this zombie alive , AFAIK, every martial art, including Aikido, is backed by people who say they used whatever they knew in a real live situation and it worked. So it's almost impossible to predict what will or won't "work." Doesn't guaruntee it will work for you, but the same is true of everything else IMHO.

What "works" and what doesn't "work" is almost entirely determined by who the opponent of the moment is and the situation. Most police officers have only the most rudimentary low level force training... it's really a joke. Yet they routinely bring resistant subjects under control every day. So, you could say that Police Defensive Tactics "work". But the level at which most cops can execute these techniques wouldn't pass 4th kyu at many dojos. So it's really a result of the fact that most of the folks they arrest are really completely untrained subjects.

We know mixed martial arts "work"... we can view folks on prime time cable every night fighting. But in a bar against multiple attackers would great ground fighting skills be the ticket? Would having the opponent's friends kick your head in while you applied an arm bar mean that the art didn't "work"?

All arts evolved within a certain historical / social climate. They took things like the available technology into account, they directly reflected things like social position etc. When times in a society changed, so did the martial arts. Aikido is a perfect example of a martial art which resulted from a whole series of very drastic and very rapid social change. Takeda Sokaku spent most of his adult life teaching his skills in a society which had dismantled the very warrior class for which those skills had evolved. The Aikido Founder began teaching at a time when Japan was in an expansionist phase and gearing up for war. Most of the folks he was training early on in the 20's and 30's had some real expectation of needing this skills in combat. That colored what was taught and how they trained,

By the time the post war period arrives, Japan is a society on the midst of another huge transformation. As far as I can see, Aikido changed with those times as well. It evolved into an art in which the focus was primarily to be trans-formative for the individual and his society. What is interesting is how many folks seem to be more interested in "de-volving" the art back into something that was more geared for fighting. They recognize the impractical nature of much of Aikido and consider the direction it took to have been mistaken, a deviation from what the Founder really intended. I see no sign that this is true.

Aikido is an art that derived from another art that already had drifted from its roots. The Daito Ryu of Sokaku Takeda was his creation that came out of some aikijutsu koryu taught an elite within Aizu. Ellis Amdur talks at length about the impossibility of really knowing what the art that had been taught to Takeda looked like... Daito Ryu was his creation. It was already "out of context", an art that was based on sword at a time when warriors had stopped wearing swords or armor. It then gets morphed into Aiki Budo, which in the form it was taught in the 30's is geared more for empty hand defense. By the time we get to the post war period, the movements are even larger and more expansive. Many practitioners have little or no weapons back ground and the roots of the techniques as adjunct to sword and spear skills get almost entirely lost. Folks start to bemoan the fact that Aikido technique doesn't seem to be terribly well suited for application in circumstances that it never was designed for.

On some level Aikido is like the Microsoft Windows OS. It's still got elements of the original in it but has morphed so many times those elements are rather hidden yet they are still the foundation for the whole "logic" of the art. This logic is so ill-understood by contemporary practitioners that they engage in all sorts of discussion about the practicality or impracticality of the art in an environment in which it was never designed for. It's the wrong debate based on mistaken assumptions.

I spent quite a number of years teaching Aikido-based Defensive Tactics to Police and Security personnel. What I found was that the moment you introduced weapons back into the equation, the logic of Aikido technique became much more apparent. Folks are busy worrying about Aikido and its lack of practical application against Muy Thai which is an entirely alien style from what Aikido or its antecedents were evolved to handle. But for a police officer, who is basically a walking weapons system, all of a sudden, even very basic Aikido technique has all sorts of practical application. All those grabbing attacks, which practitioners of other martial arts rightly point out no one does, actually do occur all the time when we talk about weapons. Officers who have drawn a weapon, whether its a gun, baton, pepper spray, or a taser get grabbed all the time. Even someone with a basic knowledge of Aikido can use his technique quite nicely for weapons retention. With a bit more skill, folks have quite successfully used their basic Aikido skills to disarm unskilled subjects (those without formal weapons training).

The hardest single thing to do is to bring someone under control without inflicting injury. Yet Aikido based arrest and control techniques are used every day by law enforcement and corrections personnel to do so. Now, it's no debate that their level of training in these techniques is quite low. But that fact is that Aikido is a quite practical art if practiced enough for use in this context. Far better than any other art I can think of.

So, what does this debate about Aikido not "working" really mean. Aikido "works" best the closer the situation of its application is to the original purpose of the art. It works less and less well the farther from that one gets. My partners and I took basic jo nage techniques and applied them, with very little adaptation to SWAT and Entry Teams carrying MP5's. Even rudimentary skills in Aikido are superior in a weapons retention situation than most of the so-called weapons retention systems taught to professionals, some of which are ludicrous.

Finally, it's not the art in the end, its the practitioner. There's bad instruction in every martial art out there. A mediocrity in almost any art will lose to a skilled practitioner of some other art. And there's no way someone doing a given art that was designed for one purpose will defeat someone doing another art in a fight in which that opponent's art is better designed for that context. There's not an Aikido guy out there who is going to do knife takeaways on a skilled Kali Silat practitioner. On the other hand, give that Aikido practitioner some good grounding in Kali or Silat and he'll find quite a bit of application for his Aikido technique. That's how Canete developed Doce Pares Escrima... he combined Aikido close quarters skills with conventional stick and knife work.

But, in the end, as Aikido ended up at the end of the Founder's evolution of the art, it takes a bit of work to get it back to "application" at all. It simply isn't designed for that. Trying to make it so is silly I think and ignores the really important questions of why it took the form that it did? What was intended, what happens when you practice the art, etc. I am not saying that we shouldn't look at the totality of the art's development at each stage and see if we can ensure that anything of great value and depth from an earlier period doesn't get lost in the transition to its contemporary form. We should do that. But we also shouldn't decide that the art "went all wrong" somewhere and devolve it, because I do not think that is what happened. The art "evolved"... adapted to a new environment. The intentions off the Founder for his art are really unique. No one I know of talked about his art the way the Founder talked about Aikido. Too much focus on the practical application of technique leads folks to miss some of the essential questions.

all possible opinions have already been expressed here a hundred times over which is why I was mocking the topic. I am actually embarrassed about much of what I wrote some 10 years ago here and wish it would go away. I have changed opinions several times about Aikido over the years this topic has been going on. I currently see much value in Aikido especially now with the return to IS type training and such.

Since this topic was started I have had 5 different jobs, lived in 3 different locations, a baby son who is now 5, stopped and restarted training multiple times, and now added multitudes of gray hairs.

I am wondering if this thread will still be going on when I am in my 80's.

George Ledyard.
I just checked the first post from the year two thousand. Right on that first page there you are.

You're like an uchideshi of this thread. Respect Sir!

Regards.G.

I am probably somewhere on every iteration of this thread ever done... I have to admit to not having mastered my own advice to cultivate "complete indifference" to the subject... The only thing I can say is that I have never been the one to wake the sleeping Mummy from its tomb.

I am probably somewhere on every iteration of this thread ever done... I have to admit to not having mastered my own advice to cultivate "complete indifference" to the subject... The only thing I can say is that I have never been the one to wake the sleeping Mummy from its tomb.

Ha.ha. Very good. Got me thinking though, that could be a good point. We could all be the effect of our own morbid fascination with the living dead,,,,,,

Thank you Mr. Ledyard for your answer. I appreciate your answer and I am sure the person who restarted it does as well.

Aikido was designed for something else but would it not be ok to try to apply those same principles and possibly some of the waza in a different way to address a more wide variety of modern day situations. Aikido will probably not be as good at defending against a boxer as being a better boxer but I think it would still be valuable.

Either Aikido harmonises with the times or it dies out. Many of the Koryu schools died because they were seen as having little relevance and was replaced by the gendai arts. Now MMA has come along and the gendai arts are seen as having little relevance so they, from what I've seen, are dying out also.

In the future Aikido, Judo, Karate etc will be practiced by people, probably older than most martial artists and for the same kind of reasons people learn Koryu arts now. That's if the gendai arts survive at all.

I'm not hopeful. At the moment I get the sense within Aikido that the average age of a beginner is about 45, the few that start teaching will be 55-60 and their teaching career is only going to be about 15-20 years mostly spent teaching older people.
I think most Aikido dojo will be closed within the next 20-30 years. Judo seems to be kept bearly alive by teaching children and even Karate classes seem to be older people and young children these days.

This is just my experience. The other thing I've experienced is that you can drive past the local MMA or Thai boxing gym by where I live any time of day, any day of the week, from 9am to maybe 10pm and there are groups of young guys training while Aikido dojo are struggling to get enough students to pay the bills.

If we are not worried about if an Aikidoka can stop a Thai Boxer etc then we are not worried about the water rising around the neck of Aikido. Just because we see the question as irrelevent doesn't mean the potential student, who is the lifeblood of any art, thinks of it as irrelevent.

If a guy comes into a dojo worrying about being punched in the face and is shown three ways of dealing with a wrist grab we shouldn't be suprised when he goes to the Thai Boxing instructor who'll show him exactly what he's looking for and when he walks out of the Aikido dojo he takes the future of Aikido with him.

I'm not hopeful. At the moment I get the sense within Aikido that the average age of a beginner is about 45, the few that start teaching will be 55-60 and their teaching career is only going to be about 15-20 years mostly spent teaching older people.
I think most Aikido dojo will be closed within the next 20-30 years. Judo seems to be kept bearly alive by teaching children and even Karate classes seem to be older people and young children these days.

The average age of my beginners is about 20 at the moment, I started at 18 in 1980. I have been teaching nearly 25 years and I am now approaching my 50th birthday. I don't teach children. I make enough money to easily pay the rent on my dojo. I do not take a fee, it is all voluntary.

Recently I have had three 17 year old join and they are enthusiastic students with no interest in MMA.

As for whether aikido works......in my case it has, regularly, as a police officer (now medically retired) of 12 years. I was shown the police system but it was not a system that I felt was at all comprehensive enough. But then, officers were expected to learn techniques once a week for the training period with sporadic lessons back at their own force. Regarding the argument on what works, it is more down to whether the individual can control their adrenaline flow (fear factor) when reacting to a violent offender or not coupled with the ability to make ones movement a natural reaction to the situational demands at that moment. If you wish - a state of mushin.

They must like fighting and thinking that's the way to handle fighting. Majority do alas...

Regards.G.

It's a curious kind of martial artist that doesn't like fighting, fighting being at the core of anything martial. If a person doesn't like it and sees that there is a better way then learning how to do it strikes me, pun intended, as being bizarre. There are lots of other ways to follow the

If Aikido is a better way of handling fighting, then as a group, we're not exactly going out of our way to demonstrate it so we can't blame people for not wanting to learn it.

The average age of my beginners is about 20 at the moment, I started at 18 in 1980. I have been teaching nearly 25 years and I am now approaching my 50th birthday. I don't teach children. I make enough money to easily pay the rent on my dojo. I do not take a fee, it is all voluntary.

Recently I have had three 17 year old join and they are enthusiastic students with no interest in MMA.

There are always dojo that buck the trend; my dojo did for a long time because we were located in a six form college so most of the new guys were under 18. That doesn't impact the trend significantly.

..... All arts evolved within a certain historical / social climate. They took things like the available technology into account, they directly reflected things like social position etc. When times in a society changed, so did the martial arts. Aikido is a perfect example of a martial art which resulted from a whole series of very drastic and very rapid social change ..... The art "evolved"... adapted to a new environment. The intentions off the Founder for his art are really unique. No one I know of talked about his art the way the Founder talked about Aikido. Too much focus on the practical application of technique leads folks to miss some of the essential questions.

Loved your post, George, and agreed with all of it. I only snipped it for length.

The only thing is I'm not interested in "devloving" Aikido as drawing on it. But I completely agree with the idea that a lot of things work as weapons retention based on my own experimentation with double dagger: Morote dori makes no sense empty hand but does if nage has a weapon, but then the intent of the technique changes (when there's another knife in the free hand, obviously). Although obviously, your cops figured that. Call it a book worm quibbling with someone in the lab.